Day #252 – Process Note - Blogging

Gatlinburg TN

Every now and then, someone points out that I haven’t blogged in forever.  Not quite true.  I blog nearly every day.  What doesn’t happen is the posting.  At the very least, I make detailed notes of the day and what I want to blog about.  I have to sit with some of the entries for a while, to make sure I got the tone right and expressed the feelings and ideas accurately, while omitting unnecessary words.  “Coat of Many Colors” and “The Good News” would be examples of that.  Some entries, like the one I’m working on about Tom’s mother, aren’t connected to a specific day.  Those I work on even longer, trying to make them better pieces of writing.

We have a fairly involved process for getting photos ready for the blog and for online viewing.  We have been so busy lately that we haven’t even taken photos off our camera cards.  I’ve been procrastinating on posting to the blog because I don’t have photos to share.  If I were to post them as they are now, without processing, it would be a nightmare to go back and fix.  I finally looked at a calendar, muttered under my breath, and decided to post without pictures.

I’m trying to figure out how to post some of the extra material we’ve accumulated.  Some of you have asked for budget information because you’re thinking of doing a road trip some day.  Some of you have asked for gasoline/mileage data.  We’d love to post restaurant reviews and other notes that might come in useful when any of you pass through places we’ve been. 

For us, the answer is a web site.  Kelly wants to write it in PHP.  It’s a great language, but I don’t know it.  I’m more familiar with HTML.  We’re both pretty good with CSS and XHTML.  Sorry about the geek-speak – we can’t agree on a language to use to develop the site.  We have style clashes, too.  Her work in web design required her to build and implement sites that were totally complete.  My work experience is in building large sites in phases.  We have agreed on a design for the home page and a layout for the site itself.  We’ve also pretty much decided to build our own blog within the site so that we have better control over how it works.

Day # 42 - Process Note – Where Did We Start?

We’ve had several discussions about where our journey started.  It would be easy to say we started from Debbie and Linda’s farm in Boggsville, near Sarver Pennsylvania.  The photo at the top of our blog’s home page was taken by Linda, minutes before we started our trip with the trailer.

Maybe we started from the easternmost point of North America.  In October 2009, we visited Anne and Cathy in Brunswick Maine.  While there, we climbed Cadillac Mountain (with the car!), in Acadia National Park (http://www.nps.gov/acad/index.htm).  Cadillac Mountain is the highest point on the east coast.  The rising sun touches this place in North America before any other.  So, maybe this is where our journey started.

For me, the journey really started with the tiniest fleeting daydream.  My mother, my last remaining relative, died in October 2002.  As Christmas neared, I realized I could not celebrate.  There were too many memories and too much pain.  One day, Kelly took me to see the movie The Santa Clause.  While the credits were rolling, I started to cry.   Kelly said she wished she could just wrap me up in a big quilt and take me to Disney World.  While Disney wouldn’t end my grieving, it would, in her eyes, give me a break from it.  It would take me out of my routine and give me a Christmas that would be full of new memories, with no links to my past.  While people are sometimes sad at Disney, nothing bad ever happens there.  I told her to call AAA and make it happen.

While at Disney, we went to the camping area to explore a bit. We rented a golf cart and rode around the RV park.  I had never been in an RV park before and thought it was pretty interesting.  I was an experienced backpacker, so I was familiar with the notion of taking one’s home on one’s back and heading out into the Great Unknown.  I wondered what it would be like to do this.  Certainly, it would be easier on my knees than toting a pack.  Where did these people go?  Was it a vacation or a way of life?  Were there people like me doing this?

A couple months later, in an effort to fight the winter blues, we went to an RV show.  Holy cow.  Row after row of little white boxes.  All different sizes and styles.  There were big buses that cost more than a mansion.  There were little trailers that could be towed by a VW Beetle.  And there was everything in between.  We started daydreaming together, and out loud.  Could this be fun?

The RV show became a winter tradition for us.  Each year, we walked up and down those rows of motor homes, trailers, campers, and 5th wheels.  By 2004, we made a transition.  Our daydream turned into a goal.

On my 50th birthday (February 2004), I implemented a Five Year Plan.  I would retire at 55 and we would hit the road.  Kelly was the first one to suggest we sell the house.  I talked with my Money Guy, Jim.  After a couple years, he caught on that I was serious.  He’s been one of my biggest supporters, by the way, and has found creative ways to ensure I complete this journey without sacrificing long-term security.  We tweeked our dates and tasks many times over those five years, but the goal had definitely become a plan.

By 2007, we had started learning about RV travel and making decisions about what kind of rig we wanted.  We read lots of books and tried to talk with anyone we met who had a rig.  We decided on a trailer because we knew we wanted to kayak and take lots of day trips.  You can’t pull a big ‘ole RV down to a boat launch.  We had just bought the Chevy Colorado and couldn’t afford to buy a newer heavier truck, so we had to find a trailer we could tow with what we had.  We heard about the TrailManor (http://www.trailmanor.com/index.htm) trailer and made a point to visit their factory.  Kelly didn’t like the way they were made until she understood that all RVs and trailers are made sparse and light.  It seemed like the perfect solution for us, except for the price.  We decided to find a used TrailManor and fix it up.

By 2008, I had a project plan in place.  We started planning actual dates for things to happen.  In April, we found a used 1996 TrailManor in Dillsburg Pennsylvania.  We bought it and Kelly worked most of the summer to fix it up.  We set up the trailer at a campground and visited it nearly every weekend.  Kelly lived in it for a few weeks while she completed the renovations and repairs.  We liked it and thought we could do it full time.  I started working from home full time, partly to avoid the stress of the office, but also to help us make the transition to being together full time.  We worked on our kayak skills, taking classes, reading books, and paddling as much as we could.  We got serious about paring down our possessions.  We took truckloads of clothes and furniture to various charities.  We were excited that this dream was becoming a reality.

In 2009, we started making things happen.  We focused on getting as healthy as possible, taking care of medical, vision, and dental issues, hoping to minimize problems and surprises on the road.  Kelly worked to get our house in Florida ready for new renters, and ultimately for us when we finish our journey.

I retired in early July 2009, and auction off our possessions in early August.  I worked to clean out the house and get it ready for sale while Kelly put the finishing touches on the house in Florida.  We took a two-week trip to Mexico in late September and visited our friends in Maine in October.  We were homeless for a few weeks between returning from Maine and hitting the road on Thanksgiving Day.  Unlimited thanks to all who fed us, housed us, and loved us.

Regardless of where, or when, you think we started, we are definitely on our way.  Destination unknown, route unknown, adventure guaranteed.

Day #41 - Process Note: Building this Blog

My friend Kip told me it was important to document the process Kelly and I use to design our blog and website.  He thought it would be useful to others, and to ourselves, to explore how we communicated, how we resolved issues, and how we came to understand one another better as a result of this process.  He also wanted to learn about the organizational structure of our work.  With that in mind, here is a process note, devoted to our current online status.  Techie notes are at the end so they’re easier to skip if you’re not interested.

When we first started planning this trip, we decided to have a website that would contain the chronicle of our journey.  We had been collaborating on a big Internet project at the time (Kip, you know which project that was.), and designing a website together seemed like a good idea.

We had already purchased a web address to build a site from scratch.  As we got closer to actually leaving, we started having trouble agreeing on purpose, layout, design, even the language for programming it.  The disagreements were getting in the way of either of us journaling our experiences, let alone sharing them.  We finally reached the ultimate stalemate – one very generic home page that would branch to two separate sites.  Might as well paint a line down the middle of the trailer.

After a couple weeks on the road, with no published stories, I hit my stubborn spot and read everything I could find about Google’s blog product.  It’s free, but they hope the blog owner will add advertisements to the site.  It’s built on templates, so there is some latitude in design, but not the control we’d been expecting.  That night, I learned how to create the blog site and built a prototype.  Kelly was OK with it, but it wasn’t great.  A couple of you may have seen this early version.  Later, I found a better template and re-built the blog.  Kelly really liked that one, so I published it.

We’ve gone back and forth quite a bit on the purpose of the blog.  For me, it’s a way to work out my experiences and try to put words to my internal journey.  It’s been a long time since I’ve written narratives or descriptions – it’s nice to tell a story!  It’s also a way to stay connected with my friends and family.  It isn’t so important to me to write a log of what happened each day, or to have an entry for every day. 

We talked about writing each entry together.  That just wasn’t going to work: partly because of our differing purposes, partly because our humor is different, partly because our writing styles are different, partly because we rarely feel like writing at the same time.  At this point, I write mine and she writes hers. That seems to be working out well.

Yesterday, while driving, we got into a heated discussion about how to organize all the various files on our individual hard drives, plus a portable drive we both use.  A couple times, we had to go to separate corners of the truck to cool off and think about what’s really important.  Take two strong women, each of whom is used to being in charge, and let them work it out.  Yesterday, the truck was not big enough for both of us.

Today, we made peace and solved the immediate problems.  We now have a standard file structure on each of our laptops, plus the portable hard drive we share.  We’ve agreed to  naming conventions for our files and documents.  We’ve agreed to ensure that each photo can be viewed full-size, by clicking on its thumbnail in the blog entry. 

We have not agreed on how raw photos from the camera will be handled, or with what software, to get them ready for the Internet.  For example, I like to use Adobe PhotoShop and Kelly likes to use Google’s Picassa.  I like to put a border (brown to match the blog template) around each photo to “ground” it within the text.  My early entries had a drop shadow, also brown, but I’ve conceded that – it’s just too time-consuming and probably not worth the hassle.  The real problem with my photos was size - I was putting small photos on my blogs that could not be seen full-screen.  So, as a result, all my photos will have to be re-created from the raw image to match our new standards.

To date, photos have been our biggest problem.  It’s time consuming, and not much fun, to sort the raw images into folders.  The cameras automatically name them with funky numbers that don’t make much sense to us.  We have trouble remembering who transferred photos from the cameras and where those photos were stored.  Later, when we start processing a photo for inclusion on the blog, more problems arise.  With time and experience, these issues will work themselves out.  We’ll probably change our standards a few times before we get it right.

As for that website we own, but aren’t currently using…  We’ve agreed to use the site to display slide shows, photo albums, spreadsheets, and other material that doesn’t really work on a blog site.   I’m hoping it will be ready in the next couple weeks. 

This process of working together has been surprisingly hard for us.  Perhaps it’s stress or lack of rhythm, but neither of us has been very good at listening to the other.  Solving this problem of blog organization forced us to listen and to have purposeful communication.  We will undoubtedly change our blog and website strategy. (Yes, we’ll keep you posted on that.)  We’ll undoubtedly have more heated discussions about it.  Hopefully, our disagreements will not stand in the way of you reading new stories.

Techie Notes on Organizational Structure

There are a lot of different files or documents that are used for the blog:
•    Original documents, usually Word, where we write our content
•    NotePad files that contains a text-only version of the Word document.  These are used to copy the content into the blog template in Google so we avoid transferring Microsoft’s embedded codes.
•    Original “raw” photos from the cameras
•    Corrected photos
•    Downsized  versions of the corrected photos for the blog
•    Another set of Word documents that containsthe final content, with edits and photos, copied back from the blog.  This is a result of reality – after we see our entries online, we always seem to have little changes.

That’s a lot of files!  Each needs a unique name and needs to be in a folder where we can find it again. 

We have a main folder, called Blog, which holds subfolders for:
•    Blog entries – working copies of various unpublished material
•    Website – working files for the website, both published and unpublished
•    Photos – corrected photos for publication on the blog or website
•    Workspace - temporary storage for files, mostly phots, being worked on
•    Final – blog entries copied back from the Internet for personal archival

Each of those folders is further subdivided: there is a folder for 2009 and 2010 in each of them.  Then, within each year, there are separate folders for each month.
Files are named based on the date of the blog entry.  Thus, the photos that go with a specific blog entry are named to match that entry, with a sequential code at the end of the filename. Here’s a screen shot of our directory structure: